Abstract

Animals that navigate and hunt by echolocation, such as some bats and marine mammals, have been observed to change their sonar pulse depending on the environment, as well as during hunting. It has become of interest to incorporate these strategies into man‐made sonar waveform and receiver design. We examine the benefits of optimal waveform design versus transmitting a linear FM waveform for detecting elastic objects. Performance loss suffered by assuming a point target is also examined. Our approach utilizes a method recently proposed by Kay to design the optimal power spectrum of the transmit waveform. Because there is an unlimited number of waveforms with the same power spectrum, we further impose a time domain constraint, in terms of the signal duration, to obtain a unique optimal waveform. [Work supported by ONR 321US.]